On the Frontier eBook

like this old man, would have sympathized with her;
she had an instinctive feeling that, in their own
hopeless decay and hereditary unfitness for this new
civilization, they would have been more tolerant of
her husband’s failure than his own kind.
She could not believe that Don Jose really hated her
husband for buying of the successful claimant, as
there was no other legal title. Allowing herself
to become interested in the guileless gossip of the
new handmaiden, proud of her broken English, she was
drawn into a sympathy with the grave simplicity of
Don Jose’s character, a relic of that true nobility
which placed this descendant of the Castilians and
the daughter of a free people on the same level.

In this way the second day of her occupancy of Los
Cuervos closed, with dumb clouds along the gray horizon,
and the paroxysms of hysterical wind growing fainter
and fainter outside the walls; with the moon rising
after nightfall, and losing itself in silent and mysterious
confidences with drifting scud. She went to bed
early, but woke past midnight, hearing, as she thought,
her own name called. The impression was so strong
upon her that she rose, and, hastily enwrapping herself,
went to the dark embrasures of the oven-shaped windows,
and looked out. The dwarfed oak beside the window
was still dropping from a past shower, but the level
waste of marsh and meadow beyond seemed to advance
and recede with the coming and going of the moon.
Again she heard her name called, and this time in
accents so strangely familiar that with a slight cry
she ran into the corridor, crossed the patio, and reached
the open gate. The darkness that had, even in
this brief interval, again fallen upon the prospect
she tried in vain to pierce with eye and voice.
A blank silence followed. Then the veil was suddenly
withdrawn; the vast plain, stretching from the mountain
to the sea, shone as clearly as in the light of day;
the moving current of the channel glittered like black
pearls, the stagnant pools like molten lead; but not
a sign of life nor motion broke the monotony of the
broad expanse. She must have surely dreamed it.
A chill wind drove her back to the house again; she
entered her bedroom, and in half an hour she was in
a peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER V

The two men kept their secret. Mr. Poindexter
convinced Mrs. Tucker that the sale of Los Cuervos
could not be effected until the notoriety of her husband’s
flight had been fairly forgotten, and she was forced
to accept her fate. The sale of her diamonds,
which seemed to her to have realized a singularly
extravagant sum, enabled her to quietly reinstate the
Pattersons in the tienda and to discharge in full her
husband’s liabilities to the rancheros and his
humbler retainers.